Politics trumps everything, even during a global pandemic – Reading Eagle

The United States was a pretty divided place at the start of 2020.

Partisanship was running rampant, thanks in large part to the passions that boiled over during the 2016 election and continued to simmer in President Donald Trump’s first three years in the White House.

Americans had hunkered down in their respective ideological silos, with partisan media and the echo chamber of social media fanning the growing flames of distrust and vitriol.

It seemed like it would take a miracle to reunite the nation, that something monumental would have to take place for Americans to call a truce.

In March, that happened.

That’s when COVID began spreading its deadly tentacles across the country. The national health crisis created widespread fear that suddenly thrust Americans together in a fight against a common enemy.

Of course, it didn’t last long.

Within a few months, Americans had retreated back to their partisan camps, with the pandemic becoming the new and fashionable thing to squabble over.

So what happened? How did the country wind up so divided again so quickly? And what does that mean for how the country deals with future crises?

A moment of unity

The initial response to the pandemic was fairly unified.

With case counts and deaths rapidly rising in parts of the country, Trump issued a national state of emergency on March 13.

That same month he signed into law a historic $2.2 trillion stimulus package as the American public and economy fought the devastating spread of COVID.

The CARES Act was, at that time, the largest emergency legislation in the history of the nation.

Key elements of the package included sending checks directly to individuals and families, a major expansion of unemployment benefits, money for hospitals, financial assistance for small businesses and loans for distressed companies.

Dr. John Kennedy, a political science professor at West Chester University in Chester County, said that it is important to remember that the early moves to address the pandemic had support across party lines.

“The government did come together to pass some very important and incredibly expensive legislation during the pandemic to keep the economy afloat,” he said. “You had a Republican administration and a Democratic Congress that did work together.”

With the government working together, the public followed suit. For the most part, people understood the need for widespread shutdowns and other mitigation efforts in the face of a deadly, highly infectious disease that health experts knew frighteningly little about.

In early April nearly half of Americans named COVID as the biggest issue facing the country, according to a Gallup poll. That made it far and away the biggest concern, dwarfing the second-place finisher of government or poor leadership (20%).

“I think for a short period of time the world was so shocked and scared, frankly, that there was a coming together at that time and it lasted for a little while,” Kennedy said. “But somewhere along the line, it got political.”

Dr. Steve Lem, chairman of the department of philosophy and government at Kutztown University, said the first signs of the politicization of the pandemic came from the White House.

“The power of the president in this kind of response is mostly rhetoric,” he said. “In that sense, could Trump have done a better job portraying the pandemic as a serious event in the beginning? Probably. But there were also arguments that we didn’t want to create mass hysteria and see a run on medical supplies that hospitals needed.”

Despite the frantic efforts to thwart the pandemic and the historic measures being taken to slow the spread of COVID, Trump repeatedly downplayed the potential impact. He publicly stated several times that the virus would disappear quickly, and that mitigation efforts would likely end by summer.

While the pandemic didn’t disappear by summer, the unified response to it did.

The tides turn

Feelings about the pandemic began to change by the summer of 2020 after Americans endured months of stay-at-home orders, school and business closures and requirements to wear masks in public spaces put in place to fight rising case counts and deaths.

With the start of warmer weather, the pandemic appeared to wane. Case counts and deaths were shrinking, and many people felt the worst was behind us.

The fear of COVID lessened, and with it the unity that fear had created. Sides started forming, mostly around party lines, between those who wanted to ditch the measures put in place to fight the pandemic and those who wanted them to stick around.

The differing opinions about how to deal with the pandemic quickly turned nasty. There was a lot of anger stemming from the sacrifices people had been forced to make, and where to direct it was unclear.

“We had never had this kind of invisible enemy, so to speak, in the modern era,” Lem said. “As we’re seeing right now with the war in Ukraine, it’s easier to come together when you have an external enemy. But the pandemic has the opposite effect here.

“We became more divisive,” he continued. “When you have an invisible enemy, where do you target that collective hostility?”

Lem said that the frustration of wanting to find someone to blame but not having a clear target manifested itself as a partisan conflict.

That partisanship only grew over time, Dr. Amy Widestrom, associate professor of politics and government at Arcadia University in Montgomery County, said.

“By the end of the first year of the pandemic, it became increasingly common to see people having verbal and physical altercations with those who held opposing viewpoints,” she said. “And if your elected official wasn’t from the party that you trust, then you sort of resorted back to the thinking that they’re not doing the right thing.”

Politicians took notice of the growing divide and took advantage.

Widestrom said that politicians could have used their influence to encourage unity, but many chose not to.

Widestrom said there was a certain tone missing starting with the federal lawmakers down to the state lawmakers on how to deal with the health crisis. She said there is the hard power that comes from policymaking, but there is a soft power of relational work that happens among politicians across levels of government.

“I think politicians missed an opportunity to lead,” she said. “But politicians want to get reelected and this happened during a high-stakes election cycle so when they saw the polarization that was happening they were going to do what it took to win.”

Widestrom noted that the partisanship may not have taken hold as quickly had it not been a year in which there was a presidential election. She’s confident it still would have happened, just maybe not that fast.

“Politicians are motivated by their own ambitions,” she said. “ So when they realized that this was going to be a big campaign issue, they also retreated to their partisan positions.”

Widestrom said that the political rhetoric and the public’s growing frustration with the pandemic fed off of each other. And that derailed any hope of a unified fight.

“Rather than taking this enormously disruptive opportunity to sort of reimagine the way parties could respond to crises in a more united way, politicians retreated because that would have taken some real political risk and there was no electoral incentive to do that,” Widestrom said.

Kennedy said he was not surprised by the political divide that developed, saying it mirrors what’s been going on for quite some time.

“This goes back to the underlying ideology of two parties when it comes to what is the role of government as far as society is concerned,” he said. “Some tend to favor less government involvement, and others tend to favor a strong national government. That was kind of to be expected.”

Kennedy said that debate became the central theme of the presidential election.

“Ultimately, the public decided in November of 2020 what the overall approval was of the way President Trump handled the pandemic because that was the overarching issue of the election,” he said. “His defeat was actually pretty rare because, historically, Americans have decided to stick with the same leadership during these moments of national crisis.”

Lem said that another factor in the growing divide was how decisions about COVID were being made. After its initial efforts, the federal government basically punted the issue to the states.

“It really shows one of the challenges of having a federal structure in the United States,” he said. “Even though President Trump was the person in charge of the country, most of the pandemic response fell to individual states and governors became really important.

“It came down to states to impose those mandates, lockdowns and restrictions,” he added. “So federalism is really one of the culprits for why we didn’t have a better national response.”

Lost in echo chambers

The growing political divides that began in the summer of 2020 and crescendoed with the election were exacerbated by the way Americans consume media.

More and more over the last two decades, people have retreated to the comfort of news sources that reinforce their own beliefs. Twenty-four-hour networks cater to certain political perspectives, and social media has become a platform for misinformation.

Widestrom said she believes these fractured news sources and heightened public engagement helped speed up the country’s departure from its brief moment of unity.

“I think the reason it frayed pretty quickly is that we had an enormous trust gap in terms of news sources and where we were getting our information,” she said. “So while a virus is decidedly nonpartisan, there was a point where our news sources and our own biases sort of came back.”

Widestrom said that since people have so many different ways to choose the information they receive, those biases started to influence the way they viewed the subsequent response to the pandemic. She said that was when people began to retreat into those hyperpartisan responses to what elected officials were doing.

Lem said that another issue adding to the divide was that it was not crystal clear whether mitigation efforts were working well. That left people searching for answers, and often bristling when they didn’t like the ones they heard.

“I think the evidence bears out that, on average, Americans are probably not as well informed about medical science as they could be, which means they’re more reliant on experts to tell them what the effectiveness of these strategies are,” he said. “And that hasn’t been well communicated by politicians or the medical community.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci became a sort of de facto spokesperson when it came to the pandemic. But even though he’s not a politician, he became a political figure because people weren’t happy with what he was telling them, Lem said.

“There’s really no spokesperson for that kind of information,” he said. “Dr. Fauci was to some extent, but then it looked to some that he was walking back some of these recommendations rather than understanding that we were constantly getting new information.”

And how people felt about the guidance that was coming from places like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was often determined by how they consume media, Lem said. There has been a growing distrust of media in some circles, which leads people to unreliable and sometimes intentionally dishonest sources like social media.

Or, to their preferred politicians, who were more than willing in many cases to focus on pleasing their constituents to score political points.

Were any lessons learned?

So what does the experience of the pandemic say about the state of the country? What should people expect if there’s another wave of COVID or a different pandemic down the road or some other national crisis?

Will people come together or remain divided? Have we learned anything?

“I don’t think we will learn much from our mistakes,” Lem said. “If anything, what people may learn is that, unless there are really dire circumstances, these more restrictive measures will not be accepted a second time around. I think we’ve hit that point of fatigue with the restrictive measures.”

To see a more unifying effect, we would have to see an even more deadly virus — or other dangerous threat — than what we have gone through, Lem guessed.

Even then it’s not clear that the country would come together, at least not for long. COVID has shown that Americans have become difficult to unite, and eager to divide.

Widestrom said that a lot will depend on politicians, and how they decide to lead when facing tough decisions. She said there are two models of representation in our democracy.

Some elected officials imagine themselves going to Washington or Harrisburg to be delegates on behalf of their constituents, so they are there to do what their constituents want them to do, she said. That means it doesn’t really matter what the information and data shows, they see themselves as an extension of their voters.

Then there is the trustee model. They imagine themselves going to Washington or Harrisburg being entrusted to take the information and data they receive and make the best decision on the behalf of their constituents, she said.

“And the challenge in a representative system is that the elected officials operate with their own understanding of what they are: delegates or trustees,” she said. “Lately, especially as information has become more available to voters, we’ve seen a trend toward that delegate style of representation.”

And that’s a tricky spot, she said, because it can lead to politicians and their constituents feeding each other in an endless cycle of political vitriol and partisan division.

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